Few sports have evolved as rapidly from one Olympics to the next as skiing and snowboarding. This year is no exception, with five ski and snowboard events making their Olympic debut. Here’s a predictive guide to the biggest stories of the Olympics—as well as some quietly compelling alternative storylines, the best days to tune in, and the words and phrases you should know before plunging into the sprawling media coverage of the Games.

People you’re about to get sick of hearing about: There’s no escaping the United States’ Shaun White. Perhaps the most recognizable and dominant winter-sport athlete of his generation, the ubiquitous product spokesman and two-time gold medalist in snowboard halfpipe is back to defend his title in his third Olympic Games—and, as these things tend to happen, he now finds himself one of the older competitors in the field. Among his many hungry young challengers is the 15-year-old Japanese wunderkind Ayumu Hirano, who, last when he was 14, took second place to White at the 2013 Winter X Games. Sports Illustratedcalls Hirano “the biggest threat to Shaun White's Olympic dominance.” White had plans to compete in the inaugural Olympic snowboard slopestyle event (more on that later), but announced on Wednesday morning that he was dropping out of the competition.*

But, speaking of athletes with a seemingly omniscient advertising presence, there’s also Ted Ligety—the 28-year-old American alpine skier and part-time muse for hilarious musical JC Penney ads—who arrives in Sochi after the best season of his career. The 18-time World Cup winner earned three gold medals at the 2013 World Championships in Austria, and looks to add a few more Olympic medals to the gold he won in the combined event in 2006.

And in the absence of the injured fan favorite Lindsey Vonn, much of the focus in this year’s women’s events will shift to Mikaela Shiffrin, the 18-year-old Colorado native who graced one of the covers of Sports Illustrated’s Olympics preview issue. Shiffrin, who specializes in slalom and giant slalom, holds a World Cup title and a world championship title in slalom.

Subplots worth noting: An ocean away from Ligety, Shifrin, and White, another intriguing story has been quietly brewing in Norway. Thirty-three-year-old cross-country skier Marit Bjoergen, a fourth-time Winter Olympian with seven medals to her name, will attempt to add more to her collection. Bjoergen said in January she was considering competing in six events in Sochi; if she gets to 11 medals, she’ll become the most decorated female winter Olympian ever.

Her personal goal, however, is modest: one individual gold. “I know how hard it is," she told Reuters in January. "You have to have a good day.”

But perhaps the most compelling storyline this year will center on the success or failure of a newly minted Olympic competition: the visually splendid men’s and women’s slopestyle events. The skiing and snowboarding forms of slopestyle—which will both appear at the Olympics this year—combine terrain and aerial elements. A winter X Games staple, the slopestyle events are just two of several new competitions added to the Olympic program this year—alongside men’s and women’s ski halfpipe, men’s and women’s snowboard parallel special slalom, and women’s ski jumping.

A quick intro, by way of Shaun White’s gold medal-winning snowboard slopestyle run at the 2012 X Games:

At this point, however, concerns about the events’ safety have clouded the excitement. Norway’s Torstein Horgmo, considered a medal contender in snowboard slopestyle, pulled out of competition after breaking his collarbone during a training run on Monday. On Tuesday, White wiped out and jammed his wrist; later that day, Finland's Marika Enne left the course on a stretcher after falling and getting a concussion. Olympic officials are reportedly revamping the course—which White calls "intimidating"—to avoid safety hazards.

Words and phrases to know:

The 1440 Triple Cork:The arrival of slopestyle brings with it all sorts of new eye-popping (and dangerous) spectacles—and one of them is the complicated snowboarding maneuver involving four complete rotations and three separate instances in which the athlete is upside down. The documentary Shaun White: Russia Callingchronicled the snowboarding champ’s struggle to master the trick before the Olympics. At the time, it was a necessary measure* aimed at maintaining a competitive edge: As Transworld Snowboarding puts it, “When slopestyle makes its Olympic debut … Sochi will be the triple-cork Games.”

Progression:In addition to the precision of their execution, the amplitude of their jumps, and the difficulty, variety, and amplitude of their maneuvers, slopestyle and halfpipe snowboarders are also judged in the unusual category of “progression”—that is, the extent to which they’ve added new tweaks or twists to existing tricks.

Best days to watch: Tune in on February 8 and 9 for the women’s and men’s slopestyle competitions, respectively. And on February 11, come back for the widest variety of ski and snowboard events the fortnight offers: men’s and women’s cross-country sprint events, women’s ski slopestyle, men’s snowboard halfpipe, and women’s ski jumping.

*Update (9:50 a.m.): This post has been updated to reflect that Shaun White has dropped out of the snowboard slopestyle event.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.